1. Introduction

The idea of happiness has a complex history. Few have denied the desirability of happiness, though many have tried to distinguish "true" happiness from happiness "as commonly understood", and religions and philosophies have often prized happiness (as in Aristotle's eudaimonia, or total well-being) while demeaning some inferior alternative called (mere) "pleasure".

While moralists have had certain reservations, psychologists have been more wholehearted about hedonism and in certain fields (e.g. medicine) pleasure has found ready approval as the opposite of pain.

Historically, philosophies that make the goal of happiness or pleasure their central theme have tended to be worldly and individualistic, even where, as does Benthamite utilitarianism, they seek to achieve the "greatest happiness of the greatest number".

2. The Greeks

For the Greeks, happiness tends to be equated with faring well or doing well. Socrates (469-399 BC) refined this notion, stressing the importance not of external prosperity but of goodness and justice. Plato's (c. 428-347 BC) writings tend to portray the achievement of happiness as a moral end, distinct from the indulgence of appetite. Stoicism had similar reservations about pleasure, and the Epicureans, despite the popular associations of their name, stressed the avoidance of pain rather than the gratification of the passions.

3. The Judaeo-Christinan View

Within Judaeo-Christianity, happiness became associated with blessedness, walking in the ways of God, and with heavenly salvation. Bodily pleasures was typically shunned as sinful, and various puritanical movements stressed commandments of prohibition ("Thou Shalt Not"), asceticism, self-denial, and the mortification of the flesh. The Christian idea of blessedness became connected with the love of God.

4. A Function of Freedom

With the gradual secularization of values, especially associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the concept of happiness became increasingly linked to science, individualism, liberalism and freedom, and the hope of progress. Happiness was represented as a right, to be fulfilled alongside such other rights as liberty (of person and speech) and the security of property.

5. Utopian Thinking

Utopian thinking, from Thomas Moore's (1478-1535) Utopia (1516), began to conceptualize the elements of happy societies. With the rise of the notion of progress, old myths of the "Golden Age" -- a lost of time of bliss -- gave way to the notion that happiness lay in an attainable future state.

6. Philosophical Ideas

In the later 17th century, the concept of happiness became increasingly important in moral philosophy. For Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), happiness was viewed as the satisfaction of appetite.

Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) stressed that happiness was based on sympathy and benevolence; Smith, meanwhile, developed an economic theory which argued that the selfish behaviour of individuals in a free market would maximize economic progress and benefits of all -- a version of Bernard Mandeville's "private vices, public benefits" paradox.

John Locke's (1632-1704) psychological hedonism stimulated the accent on pleasure in the writings of French philosophies like Claude Helvetius (1715-1771) and Etienne Condillac (1715-1780), who viewed pleasure and pain as the sole motives of action.

7. The Pleasure Principle

The philosophy of pleasure was most systematically advocated by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) , whose utilitarianism embraced the notion that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" was the only meaningful, scientific, consistent criterion of good and evil. Bentham upheld a psychological hedonism in which pleasure is the goal of all purposive behaviour. He attempted to work out a "felicific calculus" in which the value of a given unit of pleasure (or pain) could be calculated by judging it for qualities like intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and the extent of number of persons affected.

Bentham believed that such a "felicific calculus" would be practically useful in assessing rational scales of punishment (too little pain would not deter; too much would unnecessarily detract from utility). Bentham's pleasure-pain theory was hedonistic, secular, and individualisitc.

Even broadly sympathetic critics, like John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), berated it for failing to make allowance for different qualities of happiness -- "higher" and "lower" pleasures. Crude utilitarianism thus made no allowance for self-perfection. Moreover, psychologically speaking, Mill believed that the conscious pursuit of pleasure was necessarily self-defeating.

8. Psychological Hedonism

During the last two centuries, psychological hedonism has become the bedrock of many theories of human (and animal) behaviour, including Behaviourist psychology. Within evolutionary biology, the pursuit of sensory happiness in the guise of survival, and the survival of the fittest, forms a key mechanism.

9. A Basic Instinct

For Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), pleasure was a basic instinct, initially taking the form of sexual gratification or libido. Since full pursuit of the "pleasure principle" appears incompatible with civilized order, the drive of pleasure is either thwarted (causing neurosis) or sublimated into art, religion, work and other creative or productive activity.

Thus Freud, and by extension modern values, in many respects reversed the priorities of earlier theologians and philosophers. They saw happiness, based on higher values, as the experience of truth, and hedonism as a kind of illusion, or at least less valuable. Freud, by contrast, saw the drive for sensory and sexual gratification as the ultimate truth about the human animal.